Deprec Plugins using gem_plugin

1 minute read

I just added automatic plugin loading to deprec2 using Zeds gem_plugin gem. Now, a number of people have been asking if deprec will support
other linux distro’s (and even other OS’s!). While I’m not interested in
implementing them myself (until I get sick of Ubuntu) I love freedom so decided
to extract all Ubuntu specific functionality into a plugin and allow others to
write their own plugins.

You can now write a plugin that will be loaded automatically by deprec2 with no
manual intervention or configuration required by the user. Follow the tutorial
on the gem_plugin site but here’s the core of it:

Make your gem dependent on gem_plugin and deprec. The way this works is clever.
When deprec starts, it requires gem_plugin which goes and looks through the
other locally installed gems. If it finds any gems that have gem_plugin and
deprec as dependencies, it loads their init.rb file.

So installed a third party plugin to support a new distro for deprec be as simple as:

sudo gem install deprec_beos

Note: I’m still hacking on deprec2 - hoping for a preview release this week!